"The Maltese Falcon" directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Ward Bond and the great character actor Elisha Cook, Jr. (look Cook up on IMDB and you'll see what I mean) reminds me a lot of the advertising industry in the second decade of the 21st Century.
More accurately, one scene does. It's a bit of foreplay between Bogart and Cook.
In the movie Cook plays Wilmer, a young "gunsel," the henchman of Greenstreet, "the Fatman." Cook is "all hat, no cattle." All attitude, no substance.
Bogart, of course, is Sam Spade. Wise, wizened, dark and experienced. He's seen it all, done it all, and somehow, against all odds, he keeps moving forward, keeps living by his code.
In this scene, Cook trains a gun on Bogart. Bogart is not fazed and "rides" the young tough. Then, this dialogue ensues:
Cook: Keep on riding me and they're gonna be picking iron out of your liver.
Spade: The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.
Yesterday I came across a couple thousand words of blather by one of the newspeak marketing technologist engagementpreneurs from a prominent west coast agency. I read his pomposity through from top to bottom two times.
I didn't understand any of it.
Occasionally I saw a word or two I recognized but those words were surrounded by other words that I didn't have the foggiest notion of.
I was left saying to myself, "yeah, but what do you do? What do you make that consumers see? What do you create that influences minds or hearts?"
Then, I remembered Spade's great line: "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter."
It explains so much of what we deal with today.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Friday, September 7, 2012
Communication.
In yesterday's "New York Times" Nicolas Kristof wrote an op-ed pieve called "Obama's First-Term Report Card." All the grades Kristof gave the President were in the "B" to "A" range.
Except for one.
One of President's grades was an "F." Failure.
And that was on "Communication."
This post is not about whether or not I agree with Kristof.
Or what I think or he thinks of the job the President is doing.
I'm not afraid to discuss politics here.
They're just not my point today.
My point today is on something simpler.
The necessity for brands and people to tell their story.
With warmth, honesty, passion and emotion.
To "sell" who they are and the reason for their actions and behaviors.
There are all sorts and manner of egg-headed blowhards who have constructed a line of blather that we live in a post-messaging age.
That no one believes.
That no one hears.
That no one cares.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
We in the communications industry have taken our eyes off the ball.
In our relentless and reckless pursuit of technology we have forgotten humanity.
We have forgotten that people need leaders. They need to be told. They need to have their world defined. Clarified. Simplified.
By politicians.
By brands.
Except for one.
One of President's grades was an "F." Failure.
And that was on "Communication."
This post is not about whether or not I agree with Kristof.
Or what I think or he thinks of the job the President is doing.
I'm not afraid to discuss politics here.
They're just not my point today.
My point today is on something simpler.
The necessity for brands and people to tell their story.
With warmth, honesty, passion and emotion.
To "sell" who they are and the reason for their actions and behaviors.
There are all sorts and manner of egg-headed blowhards who have constructed a line of blather that we live in a post-messaging age.
That no one believes.
That no one hears.
That no one cares.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
We in the communications industry have taken our eyes off the ball.
In our relentless and reckless pursuit of technology we have forgotten humanity.
We have forgotten that people need leaders. They need to be told. They need to have their world defined. Clarified. Simplified.
By politicians.
By brands.
Client service.
One of the great felicities of modern life happened to me this morning. I put on a pair of freshly laundered jeans and reached into my right front pocket. There I found a freshly-laundered $20 bill.
There's nothing quite like finding money you didn't know you had. Even a relatively nominal sum like a $20. I guess that it's what it feel like if you work for Wall Street and pocket a $17 million bonus.
You feel good all day.
It occurred to me finding the $20 that that was a good way to think about how you perform in an agency.
People you work for, whether they are internal or clients, should always feel like they've found a $20 after you present to them. They should always feel surprised and pleased by something they weren't expecting. They should always feel like they've found a gift.
There's nothing quite like finding money you didn't know you had. Even a relatively nominal sum like a $20. I guess that it's what it feel like if you work for Wall Street and pocket a $17 million bonus.
You feel good all day.
It occurred to me finding the $20 that that was a good way to think about how you perform in an agency.
People you work for, whether they are internal or clients, should always feel like they've found a $20 after you present to them. They should always feel surprised and pleased by something they weren't expecting. They should always feel like they've found a gift.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
All those dead things? They're not dead after all.
Last night President Bill Clinton spoke to some millions of Americans and in so doing threw sand in the face of every advertising pundit who's pontificated in the last 30 years.
His speech was long, 48-minutes, thus deflating over-blown notion that only sound-bites are important and the much-repeated bromide that no one has anything resembling an attention span.
The speech was as stripped down as that of an ancient Roman Senator. There was no banal powerpoint accompaniment. There was no "type crawl" and bullet points. It was just a man talking.
It was a man delivering a message.
In an era in which we've been told messaging is dead.
It was a man using an artful combination of intelligence, logic, emotion and empathy. All those things made obsolete by data visualization.
No. Last night defied all the so-called media fads that have infected our business and have become our mania du jour.
Instead, last night we saw a man who took complex ideas and made them simple and meaningful.
Last night's speech had no electronics.
No glitz.
Not even a laser-pointer.
Just motivation. Meaning. Warmth. Humanity.
It turns out those things aren't dead after all.
--
As an illustration, I've pasted Clinton's speech here. All 3,178 words of it.
Yeah, all those words.
They'll never work.
We’re here to nominate a President, and I’ve got one in mind.
I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. A man who ran for President to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before the election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression. A man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs were created and saved, there were still millions more waiting, trying to feed their children and keep their hopes alive.
I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside. A man who believes we can build a new American Dream economy driven by innovation and creativity, education and cooperation. A man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.
I want Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States and I proudly nominate him as the standard bearer of the Democratic Party.
In Tampa, we heard a lot of talk about how the President and the Democrats don’t believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everyone to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy.
The Republican narrative is that all of us who amount to anything are completely self-made. One of our greatest Democratic Chairmen, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself, but it ain’t so.
We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think “we’re all in this together” is a better philosophy than “you’re on your own.”
Who’s right? Well since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What’s the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!
It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.
Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats. After all, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to my home state to integrate Little Rock Central High and built the interstate highway system. And as governor, I worked with President Reagan on welfare reform and with President George H.W. Bush on national education goals. I am grateful to President George W. Bush for PEPFAR, which is saving the lives of millions of people in poor countries and to both Presidents Bush for the work we’ve done together after the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake.
Through my foundation, in America and around the world, I work with Democrats, Republicans and Independents who are focused on solving problems and seizing opportunities, not fighting each other.
When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody’s right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. All of us are destined to live our lives between those two extremes. Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn’t see it that way. They think government is the enemy, and compromise is weakness.
One of the main reasons America should re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to cooperation. He appointed Republican Secretaries of Defense, the Army and Transportation. He appointed a Vice President who ran against him in 2008, and trusted him to oversee the successful end of the war in Iraq and the implementation of the recovery act. And Joe Biden did a great job with both. He appointed Cabinet members who supported Hillary in the primaries. Heck, he even appointed Hillary! I’m so proud of her and grateful to our entire national security team for all they’ve done to make us safer and stronger and to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I’m also grateful to the young men and women who serve our country in the military and to Michelle Obama and Jill Biden for supporting military families when their loved ones are overseas and for helping our veterans, when they come home bearing the wounds of war, or needing help with education, housing, and jobs.
President Obama’s record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship.
He also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on Health Care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their number one priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work.
Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to keep President Obama on the job!
In Tampa, the Republican argument against the President’s re-election was pretty simple: we left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.
In order to look like an acceptable alternative to President Obama, they couldn’t say much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: to cut taxes for high income Americans even more than President Bush did; to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; to increase defense spending two trillion dollars more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend the money on; to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids. As another President once said – there they go again.
I like the argument for President Obama’s re-election a lot better. He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators.
Are we where we want to be? No. Is the President satisfied? No. Are we better off than we were when he took office, with an economy in free fall, losing 750,000 jobs a month. The answer is YES.
I understand the challenge we face. I know many Americans are still angry and frustrated with the economy. Though employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend and even housing prices are picking up a bit, too many people don’t feel it.
I experienced the same thing in 1994 and early 1995. Our policies were working and the economy was growing but most people didn’t feel it yet. By 1996, the economy was roaring, halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in American history.
President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No President – not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the President’s contract you will feel it.
I believe that with all my heart.
President Obama’s approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America must take to build a 21st century version of the American Dream in a nation of shared opportunities, shared prosperity and shared responsibilities.
So back to the story. In 2010, as the President’s recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around.
The Recovery Act saved and created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95% of the American people. In the last 29 months the economy has produced about 4.5 million private sector jobs. But last year, the Republicans blocked the President’s jobs plan costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here’s another jobs score: President Obama plus 4.5 million, Congressional Republicans zero.
Over that same period, more than more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama – the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.
The auto industry restructuring worked. It saved more than a million jobs, not just at GM, Chrysler and their dealerships, but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country. That’s why even auto-makers that weren’t part of the deal supported it. They needed to save the suppliers too. Like I said, we’re all in this together.
Now there are 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than the day the companies were restructured. Governor Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. So here’s another jobs score: Obama two hundred and fifty thousand, Romney, zero.
The agreement the administration made with management, labor and environmental groups to double car mileage over the next few years is another good deal: it will cut your gas bill in half, make us more energy independent, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and add another 500,000 good jobs.
President Obama’s “all of the above” energy plan is helping too – the boom in oil and gas production combined with greater energy efficiency has driven oil imports to a near 20 year low and natural gas production to an all time high. Renewable energy production has also doubled.
We do need more new jobs, lots of them, but there are already more than three million jobs open and unfilled in America today, mostly because the applicants don’t have the required skills. We have to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are being created in a world fueled by new technology. That’s why investments in our people are more important than ever. The President has supported community colleges and employers in working together to train people for open jobs in their communities. And, after a decade in which exploding college costs have increased the drop-out rate so much that we’ve fallen to 16th in the world in the percentage of our young adults with college degrees, his student loan reform lowers the cost of federal student loans and even more important, gives students the right to repay the loans as a fixed percentage of their incomes for up to 20 years. That means no one will have to drop-out of college for fear they can’t repay their debt, and no one will have to turn down a job, as a teacher, a police officer or a small town doctor because it doesn’t pay enough to make the debt payments. This will change the future for young Americans.
I know we’re better off because President Obama made these decisions.
That brings me to health care.
The Republicans call it Obamacare and say it’s a government takeover of health care that they’ll repeal. Are they right? Let’s look at what’s happened so far. Individuals and businesses have secured more than a billion dollars in refunds from their insurance premiums because the new law requires 80% to 85% of your premiums to be spent on health care, not profits or promotion. Other insurance companies have lowered their rates to meet the requirement. More than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents can now carry them on family policies. Millions of seniors are receiving preventive care including breast cancer screenings and tests for heart problems. Soon the insurance companies, not the government, will have millions of new customers many of them middle class people with pre-existing conditions. And for the last two years, health care spending has grown under 4%, for the first time in 50 years.
So are we all better off because President Obama fought for it and passed it? You bet we are.
There were two other attacks on the President in Tampa that deserve an answer. Both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the President for allegedly robbing Medicare of 716 billion dollars. Here’s what really happened. There were no cuts to benefits. None. What the President did was save money by cutting unwarranted subsidies to providers and insurance companies that weren’t making people any healthier. He used the saving to close the donut hole in the Medicare drug program, and to add eight years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. It’s now solvent until 2024. So President Obama and the Democrats didn’t weaken Medicare, they strengthened it.
When Congressman Ryan looked into the TV camera and attacked President Obama’s “biggest coldest power play” in raiding Medicare, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. You see, that 716 billion dollars is exactly the same amount of Medicare savings Congressman Ryan had in his own budget.
At least on this one, Governor Romney’s been consistent. He wants to repeal the savings and give the money back to the insurance companies, re-open the donut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and reduce the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by eight years. So now if he’s elected and does what he promised Medicare will go broke by 2016. If that happens, you won’t have to wait until their voucher program to begins in 2023 to see the end Medicare as we know it.
But it gets worse. They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by a third over the coming decade. Of course, that will hurt poor kids, but that’s not all. Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for seniors and on people with disabilities, including kids from middle class families, with special needs like, Downs syndrome or Autism. I don’t know how those families are going to deal with it. We can’t let it happen
Now let’s look at the Republican charge that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work.
Here’s what happened. When some Republican governors asked to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama Administration said they would only do it if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20%. You hear that? More work. So the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform’s work requirement is just not true. But they keep running ads on it. As their campaign pollster said “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself – I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.
Let’s talk about the debt. We have to deal with it or it will deal with us. President Obama has offered a plan with 4 trillion dollars in debt reduction over a decade, with two and a half dollars of spending reductions for every one dollar of revenue increases, and tight controls on future spending. It’s the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.
I think the President’s plan is better than the Romney plan, because the Romney plan fails the first test of fiscal responsibility: The numbers don’t add up.
It’s supposed to be a debt reduction plan but it begins with five trillion dollars in tax cuts over a ten-year period. That makes the debt hole bigger before they even start to dig out. They say they’ll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code. When you ask “which loopholes and how much?,” they say “See me after the election on that.”
People ask me all the time how we delivered four surplus budgets. What new ideas did we bring? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic. If they stay with a 5 trillion dollar tax cut in a debt reduction plan – the – arithmetic tells us that one of three things will happen: 1) they’ll have to eliminate so many deductions like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving that middle class families will see their tax bill go up two thousand dollars year while people making over 3 million dollars a year get will still get a 250,000 dollar tax cut; or 2) they’ll have to cut so much spending that they’ll obliterate the budget for our national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel; or they’ll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education and other programs that help middle class families and poor children, not to mention cutting investments in roads, bridges, science, technology and medical research; or 3) they’ll do what they’ve been doing for thirty plus years now – cut taxes more than they cut spending, explode the debt, and weaken the economy. Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left. We simply can’t afford to double-down on trickle-down.
President Obama’s plan cuts the debt, honors our values, and brightens the future for our children, our families and our nation.
My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in. If you want a you’re on your own, winner take all society you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities – a “we’re all in it together” society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If you want every American to vote and you think its wrong to change voting procedures just to reduce the turnout of younger, poorer, minority and disabled voters, you should support Barack Obama. If you think the President was right to open the doors of American opportunity to young immigrants brought here as children who want to go to college or serve in the military, you should vote for Barack Obama. If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is alive and well, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world, you should vote for Barack Obama.
I love our country – and I know we’re coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we’ve always come out stronger than we went in. And we will again as long as we do it together. We champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor – to form a more perfect union.
If that’s what you believe, if that’s what you want, we have to re-elect President Barack Obama.
God Bless You – God Bless America.
His speech was long, 48-minutes, thus deflating over-blown notion that only sound-bites are important and the much-repeated bromide that no one has anything resembling an attention span.
The speech was as stripped down as that of an ancient Roman Senator. There was no banal powerpoint accompaniment. There was no "type crawl" and bullet points. It was just a man talking.
It was a man delivering a message.
In an era in which we've been told messaging is dead.
It was a man using an artful combination of intelligence, logic, emotion and empathy. All those things made obsolete by data visualization.
No. Last night defied all the so-called media fads that have infected our business and have become our mania du jour.
Instead, last night we saw a man who took complex ideas and made them simple and meaningful.
Last night's speech had no electronics.
No glitz.
Not even a laser-pointer.
Just motivation. Meaning. Warmth. Humanity.
It turns out those things aren't dead after all.
--
As an illustration, I've pasted Clinton's speech here. All 3,178 words of it.
Yeah, all those words.
They'll never work.
We’re here to nominate a President, and I’ve got one in mind.
I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. A man who ran for President to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before the election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression. A man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs were created and saved, there were still millions more waiting, trying to feed their children and keep their hopes alive.
I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside. A man who believes we can build a new American Dream economy driven by innovation and creativity, education and cooperation. A man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.
I want Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States and I proudly nominate him as the standard bearer of the Democratic Party.
In Tampa, we heard a lot of talk about how the President and the Democrats don’t believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everyone to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy.
The Republican narrative is that all of us who amount to anything are completely self-made. One of our greatest Democratic Chairmen, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself, but it ain’t so.
We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think “we’re all in this together” is a better philosophy than “you’re on your own.”
Who’s right? Well since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What’s the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!
It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.
Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats. After all, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to my home state to integrate Little Rock Central High and built the interstate highway system. And as governor, I worked with President Reagan on welfare reform and with President George H.W. Bush on national education goals. I am grateful to President George W. Bush for PEPFAR, which is saving the lives of millions of people in poor countries and to both Presidents Bush for the work we’ve done together after the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake.
Through my foundation, in America and around the world, I work with Democrats, Republicans and Independents who are focused on solving problems and seizing opportunities, not fighting each other.
When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody’s right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. All of us are destined to live our lives between those two extremes. Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn’t see it that way. They think government is the enemy, and compromise is weakness.
One of the main reasons America should re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to cooperation. He appointed Republican Secretaries of Defense, the Army and Transportation. He appointed a Vice President who ran against him in 2008, and trusted him to oversee the successful end of the war in Iraq and the implementation of the recovery act. And Joe Biden did a great job with both. He appointed Cabinet members who supported Hillary in the primaries. Heck, he even appointed Hillary! I’m so proud of her and grateful to our entire national security team for all they’ve done to make us safer and stronger and to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I’m also grateful to the young men and women who serve our country in the military and to Michelle Obama and Jill Biden for supporting military families when their loved ones are overseas and for helping our veterans, when they come home bearing the wounds of war, or needing help with education, housing, and jobs.
President Obama’s record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship.
He also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on Health Care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their number one priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work.
Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to keep President Obama on the job!
In Tampa, the Republican argument against the President’s re-election was pretty simple: we left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.
In order to look like an acceptable alternative to President Obama, they couldn’t say much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: to cut taxes for high income Americans even more than President Bush did; to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; to increase defense spending two trillion dollars more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend the money on; to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids. As another President once said – there they go again.
I like the argument for President Obama’s re-election a lot better. He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators.
Are we where we want to be? No. Is the President satisfied? No. Are we better off than we were when he took office, with an economy in free fall, losing 750,000 jobs a month. The answer is YES.
I understand the challenge we face. I know many Americans are still angry and frustrated with the economy. Though employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend and even housing prices are picking up a bit, too many people don’t feel it.
I experienced the same thing in 1994 and early 1995. Our policies were working and the economy was growing but most people didn’t feel it yet. By 1996, the economy was roaring, halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in American history.
President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No President – not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the President’s contract you will feel it.
I believe that with all my heart.
President Obama’s approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America must take to build a 21st century version of the American Dream in a nation of shared opportunities, shared prosperity and shared responsibilities.
So back to the story. In 2010, as the President’s recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around.
The Recovery Act saved and created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95% of the American people. In the last 29 months the economy has produced about 4.5 million private sector jobs. But last year, the Republicans blocked the President’s jobs plan costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here’s another jobs score: President Obama plus 4.5 million, Congressional Republicans zero.
Over that same period, more than more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama – the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.
The auto industry restructuring worked. It saved more than a million jobs, not just at GM, Chrysler and their dealerships, but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country. That’s why even auto-makers that weren’t part of the deal supported it. They needed to save the suppliers too. Like I said, we’re all in this together.
Now there are 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than the day the companies were restructured. Governor Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. So here’s another jobs score: Obama two hundred and fifty thousand, Romney, zero.
The agreement the administration made with management, labor and environmental groups to double car mileage over the next few years is another good deal: it will cut your gas bill in half, make us more energy independent, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and add another 500,000 good jobs.
President Obama’s “all of the above” energy plan is helping too – the boom in oil and gas production combined with greater energy efficiency has driven oil imports to a near 20 year low and natural gas production to an all time high. Renewable energy production has also doubled.
We do need more new jobs, lots of them, but there are already more than three million jobs open and unfilled in America today, mostly because the applicants don’t have the required skills. We have to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are being created in a world fueled by new technology. That’s why investments in our people are more important than ever. The President has supported community colleges and employers in working together to train people for open jobs in their communities. And, after a decade in which exploding college costs have increased the drop-out rate so much that we’ve fallen to 16th in the world in the percentage of our young adults with college degrees, his student loan reform lowers the cost of federal student loans and even more important, gives students the right to repay the loans as a fixed percentage of their incomes for up to 20 years. That means no one will have to drop-out of college for fear they can’t repay their debt, and no one will have to turn down a job, as a teacher, a police officer or a small town doctor because it doesn’t pay enough to make the debt payments. This will change the future for young Americans.
I know we’re better off because President Obama made these decisions.
That brings me to health care.
The Republicans call it Obamacare and say it’s a government takeover of health care that they’ll repeal. Are they right? Let’s look at what’s happened so far. Individuals and businesses have secured more than a billion dollars in refunds from their insurance premiums because the new law requires 80% to 85% of your premiums to be spent on health care, not profits or promotion. Other insurance companies have lowered their rates to meet the requirement. More than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents can now carry them on family policies. Millions of seniors are receiving preventive care including breast cancer screenings and tests for heart problems. Soon the insurance companies, not the government, will have millions of new customers many of them middle class people with pre-existing conditions. And for the last two years, health care spending has grown under 4%, for the first time in 50 years.
So are we all better off because President Obama fought for it and passed it? You bet we are.
There were two other attacks on the President in Tampa that deserve an answer. Both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the President for allegedly robbing Medicare of 716 billion dollars. Here’s what really happened. There were no cuts to benefits. None. What the President did was save money by cutting unwarranted subsidies to providers and insurance companies that weren’t making people any healthier. He used the saving to close the donut hole in the Medicare drug program, and to add eight years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. It’s now solvent until 2024. So President Obama and the Democrats didn’t weaken Medicare, they strengthened it.
When Congressman Ryan looked into the TV camera and attacked President Obama’s “biggest coldest power play” in raiding Medicare, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. You see, that 716 billion dollars is exactly the same amount of Medicare savings Congressman Ryan had in his own budget.
At least on this one, Governor Romney’s been consistent. He wants to repeal the savings and give the money back to the insurance companies, re-open the donut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and reduce the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by eight years. So now if he’s elected and does what he promised Medicare will go broke by 2016. If that happens, you won’t have to wait until their voucher program to begins in 2023 to see the end Medicare as we know it.
But it gets worse. They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by a third over the coming decade. Of course, that will hurt poor kids, but that’s not all. Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for seniors and on people with disabilities, including kids from middle class families, with special needs like, Downs syndrome or Autism. I don’t know how those families are going to deal with it. We can’t let it happen
Now let’s look at the Republican charge that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work.
Here’s what happened. When some Republican governors asked to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama Administration said they would only do it if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20%. You hear that? More work. So the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform’s work requirement is just not true. But they keep running ads on it. As their campaign pollster said “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself – I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.
Let’s talk about the debt. We have to deal with it or it will deal with us. President Obama has offered a plan with 4 trillion dollars in debt reduction over a decade, with two and a half dollars of spending reductions for every one dollar of revenue increases, and tight controls on future spending. It’s the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.
I think the President’s plan is better than the Romney plan, because the Romney plan fails the first test of fiscal responsibility: The numbers don’t add up.
It’s supposed to be a debt reduction plan but it begins with five trillion dollars in tax cuts over a ten-year period. That makes the debt hole bigger before they even start to dig out. They say they’ll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code. When you ask “which loopholes and how much?,” they say “See me after the election on that.”
People ask me all the time how we delivered four surplus budgets. What new ideas did we bring? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic. If they stay with a 5 trillion dollar tax cut in a debt reduction plan – the – arithmetic tells us that one of three things will happen: 1) they’ll have to eliminate so many deductions like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving that middle class families will see their tax bill go up two thousand dollars year while people making over 3 million dollars a year get will still get a 250,000 dollar tax cut; or 2) they’ll have to cut so much spending that they’ll obliterate the budget for our national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel; or they’ll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education and other programs that help middle class families and poor children, not to mention cutting investments in roads, bridges, science, technology and medical research; or 3) they’ll do what they’ve been doing for thirty plus years now – cut taxes more than they cut spending, explode the debt, and weaken the economy. Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left. We simply can’t afford to double-down on trickle-down.
President Obama’s plan cuts the debt, honors our values, and brightens the future for our children, our families and our nation.
My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in. If you want a you’re on your own, winner take all society you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities – a “we’re all in it together” society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If you want every American to vote and you think its wrong to change voting procedures just to reduce the turnout of younger, poorer, minority and disabled voters, you should support Barack Obama. If you think the President was right to open the doors of American opportunity to young immigrants brought here as children who want to go to college or serve in the military, you should vote for Barack Obama. If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is alive and well, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world, you should vote for Barack Obama.
I love our country – and I know we’re coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we’ve always come out stronger than we went in. And we will again as long as we do it together. We champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor – to form a more perfect union.
If that’s what you believe, if that’s what you want, we have to re-elect President Barack Obama.
God Bless You – God Bless America.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Be less smart, II.
You can, whether you're writing a novel, a screen play, a love letter, a vacation memo or a :30-second spot, bury your meaning in a sinkhole of vowels and consonants. You can pile on so assiduously that by saying more, you're saying nothing.
I've just read in "The New York Times" that the Democratic Party's platform is 26,500 words long. That's 106 double-spaced typewritten pages.
It's written by and for wonks.
Not to communicate.
I've just read in "The New York Times" that the Democratic Party's platform is 26,500 words long. That's 106 double-spaced typewritten pages.
It's written by and for wonks.
Not to communicate.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Advertising advice from Bill Clinton.
When you love advertising as I do, when you live it and breathe it, you find it all around you. Over the last week or so, I've been watching the party conventions, reading, of course, op-eds in the "Times" about those conventions and seeing advertising lessons everywhere.
Both of today's lessons come from Bill Clinton by way of Roger Cohen. You can read Cohen's full column here: Cohen.
Clinton's first dicta is simple, and its impetus was the lack of "how," of explanation in Governor Romney's acceptance speech. “When people are afraid, explanation beats eloquence any day.”
In other words, cut the crap and tell us what you're going to do. We don't need fancy. We need smart. We need action. We need doing. Not just saying.
Clinton's second phrase was directed at President Obama. What Obama must do, according to Clinton is something he's not very good at. He must "explain in plain language how the United States came to its present pass and how he plans to set the country on a path to growth and jobs again. That in turn will explain why a second term would differ from the first."
In short, he has to (in Clinton's words) "put the corn where the hogs can get to it.”
In other words, communicate simply, honestly and clearly.
Both of today's lessons come from Bill Clinton by way of Roger Cohen. You can read Cohen's full column here: Cohen.
Clinton's first dicta is simple, and its impetus was the lack of "how," of explanation in Governor Romney's acceptance speech. “When people are afraid, explanation beats eloquence any day.”
In other words, cut the crap and tell us what you're going to do. We don't need fancy. We need smart. We need action. We need doing. Not just saying.
Clinton's second phrase was directed at President Obama. What Obama must do, according to Clinton is something he's not very good at. He must "explain in plain language how the United States came to its present pass and how he plans to set the country on a path to growth and jobs again. That in turn will explain why a second term would differ from the first."
In short, he has to (in Clinton's words) "put the corn where the hogs can get to it.”
In other words, communicate simply, honestly and clearly.
The United States of Focus Groups.
Joe Nocera, the financial writer turned op-ed columnist for "The New York Times" has a sentence in his column today which underscores much of what is wrong in our world and in our business. In an article about the Democratic and Republican conventions called "They're Not What They Used to Be," http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/opinion/political-conventions-are-not-what-they-used-to-be.html?hp he remarks: "I wound up thinking, do we really need three days and nights (and it
would have been four if not for the hurricane threat) for the
Republicans to “frame” their “narrative” and “humanize” their candidate?"
How many times, in how many meetings a day do we hear such marketing drivel? Framing a narrative? Humanizing a brand?
The Republicants (and the Dimmycrats will be no better) aren't saddled like we are in advertising, with humanizing a brand, however. They can't even humanize a person.
Mitt is still an amorphous lump of Mormonism who walks as if he's wearing an adult diaper. His running mate seems similarly unable to have a conviction or to tell the truth. It's one thing to lie about tax cuts, or vouchers for Medicare--but to lie about your marathon time is beyond the pale. No one who's ever run a marathon (and I've run 12) has ever forgotten their best time. And no one who is not a dyed in the wool cheater, liar and fraud would lie publicly about their time. No decent person would claim to run a sub-three when they in fact ran a four plus.
The Repugnants also seemed to trot out a different tagline every night. "We Built It," being just one.
"We Legitimized It" being another and "Masturbation is Murder," being a third.
It remains to be seen if the Dumbocrats will have one theme or many. And if they can frame a narrative that excuses the mediocrity of the current administration. Supposedly, this year's "hope" and "change" will be "forward," which sounds to me like a slogan maybe the Post Office can adopt if the Obamaites have any signs left over.
It is indeed a sad state of affairs when neither candidate or neither party--each of which has access to the best communication minds in the country--can come up with a compelling narrative, much less a vision of the future. I can conclude only that each candidate tested his messaging and everything performed slightly above "norms." That is, every message is so boring it neither offends or inspires, just like 99% of all advertising.
That's enough for right now. I'll just leave you with this.
Back in 1964, reactionary Republican (who would be a mainstream Republican today) Barry Goldwater had a slogan: "In your heart you know he's right."
The Lyndon Johnson campaign countered with something that at least had balls: "In your guts you know he's nuts."
How many times, in how many meetings a day do we hear such marketing drivel? Framing a narrative? Humanizing a brand?
The Republicants (and the Dimmycrats will be no better) aren't saddled like we are in advertising, with humanizing a brand, however. They can't even humanize a person.
Mitt is still an amorphous lump of Mormonism who walks as if he's wearing an adult diaper. His running mate seems similarly unable to have a conviction or to tell the truth. It's one thing to lie about tax cuts, or vouchers for Medicare--but to lie about your marathon time is beyond the pale. No one who's ever run a marathon (and I've run 12) has ever forgotten their best time. And no one who is not a dyed in the wool cheater, liar and fraud would lie publicly about their time. No decent person would claim to run a sub-three when they in fact ran a four plus.
The Repugnants also seemed to trot out a different tagline every night. "We Built It," being just one.
"We Legitimized It" being another and "Masturbation is Murder," being a third.
It remains to be seen if the Dumbocrats will have one theme or many. And if they can frame a narrative that excuses the mediocrity of the current administration. Supposedly, this year's "hope" and "change" will be "forward," which sounds to me like a slogan maybe the Post Office can adopt if the Obamaites have any signs left over.
It is indeed a sad state of affairs when neither candidate or neither party--each of which has access to the best communication minds in the country--can come up with a compelling narrative, much less a vision of the future. I can conclude only that each candidate tested his messaging and everything performed slightly above "norms." That is, every message is so boring it neither offends or inspires, just like 99% of all advertising.
That's enough for right now. I'll just leave you with this.
Back in 1964, reactionary Republican (who would be a mainstream Republican today) Barry Goldwater had a slogan: "In your heart you know he's right."
The Lyndon Johnson campaign countered with something that at least had balls: "In your guts you know he's nuts."
Monday, September 3, 2012
Some thoughts of yore.
I was born in the waning days of 1957--about ten decades ago it seems, or ten millennium if you think about all the ways in which the world has changed.
We were armed and aimed at the Russians, and they against us. World War III was being fought in Korea, Vietnam and outer space. There were Nike missile installations just a few miles from the house my parents bought in White Plains, to escape the sturm und drang of New York.
In much of the country, black people still couldn't vote. They went to schools that were separate and unequal and they had only just been able to play major league baseball. Pumpsie Green, the Red Sox first black player, was still more than a full-season away from playing in the big leagues.
This was a world without computers, without cellphones, without color televisions. This was a world of elevator operators, segregationist senators and cold-war cataclysms hanging like a specter over everything.
Still, it was, in many ways, a simpler time. Today, because they are today's problems, the issues of the world seem more intractable. You could find a way to negotiate peace with the Soviets. You can't negotiate with global warming. Or with the anti-fact-ers who wish to deny its presence. Likewise, though we were armed to the teeth against Krushchev, at least we knew who our enemies were. We knew how to track them. Today, if Israel attempts to destroy Iran due to Iran's looming nuclear capability and its promise to obliterate Israel, mass destruction could come from anywhere. A frightening prospect.
Even as a young boy, I grew up old. My father had a 1949 Studebaker, my mother a 1951 Plymouth. Old cars in the days when cars didn't last more than four years. What's more, at an early age I was exposed to "old" movies. Jimmy Cagney in "Public Enemy," Edward G. Robinson in "Little Caesar," Humphrey Bogart in "The Roaring Twenties." Even as a ten year old I was on a different plane than my friends. I had different reference points and I admired different people.
The suburbs of New York, back in the 50s and 60s, still had milkmen, still had vestiges of trolley tracks that would appear whenever the asphalt thinned. There were street sweepers with their rubbish bins mounted between over-sized wheels. There was a hurdy-gurdy beggar who plied the downtown streets of my home town.
Today, everything, or nearly everything seems gone. We still pantomime dialing a telephone. But we haven't actually dialed one since the 70s. We still remember subway tokens. The 10-cent toll over the Henry Hudson Bridge ($4 today or $2.20 with EZ-pass.)
My wife and I get seltzer delivered to our apartment, ten 26-oz. siphon bottles to the case once a week. The bottles, clear or blue or sometimes green, are etched with the names of old seltzer bottlers. Today at lunch we had a bottle marked "Louis Sisskin Good Health Seltzer." Bottles of Sisskin's are available on e-bay, but I can find no other evidence of who he was or where he carbonated. It's just possible that the gleaming new high-rises that have replaced the dilapidated old tenements of old New York sit on the site of Sisskin's old plant. But I'll never know.
That said, there are times when I siphon myself a cold glass of seltzer and I wish Louis Sisskin were around. Just so I could thank him.
The "Lost Art of Drawing."
The famous architect, Michael Graves, had a brilliant op-ed in Sunday's "Times," called "Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing." You can read it here: Michael Graves article
I think Graves' article can be extrapolated to our industry, to advertising. First, Graves laments how it has become fashionable in his industry to declare "the death of drawing." He wonders: "Are our hands becoming obsolete as creative tools? Are they being replaced by machines? And where does that leave the architectural creative process?"
But Graves believes that architecture should not divorce itself from drawing. He says that drawing is part of the thought process. Drawings, he says "express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands."
Again, and I think this is germane to advertising, Graves divides drawings into three types.
1. The referential sketch
2. The preparatory study
3. The definitive drawing
Graves calls the referential sketch the "record of the architect's discovery....it is not likely to represent reality but likely to capture an idea." Graves says, "These sketches are thus inherently fragmentary and selective. When I
draw something, I remember it. The drawing is a reminder of the idea
that caused me to record it in the first place. That visceral
connection, that thought process, cannot be replicated by a computer."
The preparatory study is "part of a progression of drawings that elaborate a design."
Here are the parts I really liked: "With both of these types of drawings, there is a certain joy in their creation, which comes from the interaction between the mind and the hand. Our physical and mental interactions with drawings are formative acts. In a handmade drawing, whether on an electronic tablet or on paper, there are intonations, traces of intentions and speculation. This is not unlike the way a musician might intone a note or how a riff in jazz would be understood subliminally and put a smile on your face."
And "As I work with my computer-savvy students and staff today, I notice that
something is lost when they draw only on the computer. It is analogous
to hearing the words of a novel read aloud, when reading them on paper
allows us to daydream a little, to make associations beyond the literal
sentences on the page. Similarly, drawing by hand stimulates the
imagination and allows us to speculate about ideas, a good sign that
we’re truly alive."
I think Graves' article can be extrapolated to our industry, to advertising. First, Graves laments how it has become fashionable in his industry to declare "the death of drawing." He wonders: "Are our hands becoming obsolete as creative tools? Are they being replaced by machines? And where does that leave the architectural creative process?"
But Graves believes that architecture should not divorce itself from drawing. He says that drawing is part of the thought process. Drawings, he says "express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands."
Again, and I think this is germane to advertising, Graves divides drawings into three types.
1. The referential sketch
2. The preparatory study
3. The definitive drawing
Here are the parts I really liked: "With both of these types of drawings, there is a certain joy in their creation, which comes from the interaction between the mind and the hand. Our physical and mental interactions with drawings are formative acts. In a handmade drawing, whether on an electronic tablet or on paper, there are intonations, traces of intentions and speculation. This is not unlike the way a musician might intone a note or how a riff in jazz would be understood subliminally and put a smile on your face."
Saturday, September 1, 2012
East River brothers.
Last night was another of those all-too-frequent evenings where I was visited by my old nemesis, insomnia. She kissed me awake around 3 and led me out, with Whiskey my pup, for a long walk, once again, along the river.
The East River, as we call it in the City, is not a river at all. It's a tidal strait that connects the turbid waters of the Long Island Sound, to the turbulence of the New York Harbor. Centuries ago when the Dutch were ascendant, the Dutch called the Connecticut River the East River, the Hudson, the North and the Delaware, the South. The names have changed over time and as New York and its Grid became dominant, the strait assumed its current name.
Old New Yorkers, and I count myself among them, will sometimes called the FDR Drive, which runs parallel to the East River, the East River Drive, the highway's name before Robert Moses gripped New York and made it powerfully his own.
There used to be tanneries, glue factories, abattoirs and a host of effluents that teemed into the river. Its filth was the butt of many jokes when I was a kid. But things have cleaned up since the 70s, and today there are jet-skiers in the river and the occasional kayaker.
Once years ago, my older daughter who is an accomplished open-water swimmer was going to enter a 2.4 mile race in the waters off Manhattan. She persuaded me to try a half-mile swim, though for the life of me I couldn't bear the thought of entering waters that when I was a child were considered open sewers. Fortunately, my daughter backed out before race day, and I was, like a witch who emerged from trial by dunking with her life, spared.
Whiskey and I walked, as we almost always do, north. I don't like walking south. The promenade narrows and the terrain is less interesting. There's also an interruption around the UN that disturbs the peace I find when I travel in the opposite direction. So, as I said, I go north, where the people are fatter and the crowds thinner.
Walking north there is a flagpole across from Gracie Mansion, a tall, naval mast of a flagpole that has at its tip the US Flag and on a cross spar the flag of the City of New York, an orange, white and blue affair with the seal of the city on it--a Dutchman and an Indian, and the green-leafed and white flag of the city parks department.
The land around the flagpole circles out over the river, an ideal spot for observing the turbulence of Hell's Gate. There were two Puerto Rican men in the overhang tonight, from the looks of them, twins around 30.
They knelt down in Diane Arbus-like unison and beckoned Whiskey and me over.
"Buenos noches," they said in perfect New York Puerto-Rican-Spanish, leaving the esses of their greeting off in true New Yorican-style. I greeted them back, imitating their island twang.
My dog looked tired, in fact she lay down at my feet, and we three humans leaned against the curved cast-iron that bowed in a semi-circle over the water. One of the twins began talking, looking at the churn of the current, not at me.
"Mi hermano and I married twin sisters," he began. "We are twins and they were twins." He took a long drag on the night and spit twice into the water. He was in no rush to tell his story. And I was in no rush to hear it.
"For one year all was fine. But soon it became clear that mi esposa and I, we loved each other."
The other man spoke now.
"And mi esposa and I se odian. We hated each other."
We all three now spat into the water.
"We cannot stand to be with each other at night. So mi hermano and I walk. Though he loves his wife, he walks with me."
"I would rather be home with my wife. But he is my brother and him I must be with."
Again we spit.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
Whiskey was up now, she pulled against her leash. I left the brothers to themselves, bidding them a buenos noches with no esses. And let Whiskey lead the way home
The East River, as we call it in the City, is not a river at all. It's a tidal strait that connects the turbid waters of the Long Island Sound, to the turbulence of the New York Harbor. Centuries ago when the Dutch were ascendant, the Dutch called the Connecticut River the East River, the Hudson, the North and the Delaware, the South. The names have changed over time and as New York and its Grid became dominant, the strait assumed its current name.
Old New Yorkers, and I count myself among them, will sometimes called the FDR Drive, which runs parallel to the East River, the East River Drive, the highway's name before Robert Moses gripped New York and made it powerfully his own.
There used to be tanneries, glue factories, abattoirs and a host of effluents that teemed into the river. Its filth was the butt of many jokes when I was a kid. But things have cleaned up since the 70s, and today there are jet-skiers in the river and the occasional kayaker.
Once years ago, my older daughter who is an accomplished open-water swimmer was going to enter a 2.4 mile race in the waters off Manhattan. She persuaded me to try a half-mile swim, though for the life of me I couldn't bear the thought of entering waters that when I was a child were considered open sewers. Fortunately, my daughter backed out before race day, and I was, like a witch who emerged from trial by dunking with her life, spared.
Whiskey and I walked, as we almost always do, north. I don't like walking south. The promenade narrows and the terrain is less interesting. There's also an interruption around the UN that disturbs the peace I find when I travel in the opposite direction. So, as I said, I go north, where the people are fatter and the crowds thinner.
Walking north there is a flagpole across from Gracie Mansion, a tall, naval mast of a flagpole that has at its tip the US Flag and on a cross spar the flag of the City of New York, an orange, white and blue affair with the seal of the city on it--a Dutchman and an Indian, and the green-leafed and white flag of the city parks department.
The land around the flagpole circles out over the river, an ideal spot for observing the turbulence of Hell's Gate. There were two Puerto Rican men in the overhang tonight, from the looks of them, twins around 30.
They knelt down in Diane Arbus-like unison and beckoned Whiskey and me over.
"Buenos noches," they said in perfect New York Puerto-Rican-Spanish, leaving the esses of their greeting off in true New Yorican-style. I greeted them back, imitating their island twang.
My dog looked tired, in fact she lay down at my feet, and we three humans leaned against the curved cast-iron that bowed in a semi-circle over the water. One of the twins began talking, looking at the churn of the current, not at me.
"Mi hermano and I married twin sisters," he began. "We are twins and they were twins." He took a long drag on the night and spit twice into the water. He was in no rush to tell his story. And I was in no rush to hear it.
"For one year all was fine. But soon it became clear that mi esposa and I, we loved each other."
The other man spoke now.
"And mi esposa and I se odian. We hated each other."
We all three now spat into the water.
"We cannot stand to be with each other at night. So mi hermano and I walk. Though he loves his wife, he walks with me."
"I would rather be home with my wife. But he is my brother and him I must be with."
Again we spit.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
Whiskey was up now, she pulled against her leash. I left the brothers to themselves, bidding them a buenos noches with no esses. And let Whiskey lead the way home
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